Long March: Restart
Feng Mengbo transforms one of modern China’s defining political stories into a playable artwork.
This interactive adventure is inspired by the Long March, the Chinese Red Army’s military retreat of 1934–36. It unfolds as a side-scrolling videogame artwork across two giant screens. A Red Army soldier travels through an 8-bit world inspired by historical landmarks and retro games like Street Fighter II and Super Mario Bros. Armed with exploding Coca-Cola cans, he fights iconic characters, aliens and armies as revolutionary history and global pop culture collide.
Feng first imagined Long March: Restart in 1994 as a series of paintings. It took 14 years before custom software could support the interactive version completed in 2008. The title’s “restart” suggests both a videogame mechanic and a return to history. By remixing communist and capitalist symbols with videogame references, Feng asks how history is constructed, retold and replayed through the images and systems that surround us.
Play along, or watch as the soldier advances, and join the surreal, pixelated march through time and space.
Artwork courtesy of M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation.
About the Artist
Feng Mengbo (b. 1966, Beijing) is a pioneering Chinese artist known for his use of digital technology, videogames and interactive media. He is Professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he serves as Dean of the School of Experimental Art & Sci-Tech Art.
Growing up during the Cultural Revolution and China's later period of economic reform, Feng became fascinated by the collision of political imagery, popular culture and new technologies. Since the early 1990s, he has used videogame aesthetics and software to revisit national history and contemporary life, often inserting himself or childhood heroes into game worlds.
His practice spans painting, calligraphy, installation, photography, video, performance and interactive art.
Feng has exhibited widely internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Documenta, MoMA PS1 and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Heroes, monsters and Coca-Cola
Long March: Restart is full of images from 1980s and 1990s videogames, action films, comics and Cold War history. Characters from Street Fighter II, Mega Man, Batman and other pop culture stories appear beside American astronauts, Soviet rockets, military parades and patriotic iconography.
Together, these references point to major cultural shifts in China after the Cultural Revolution – first announced in 1966, the year that Feng Mengbo was born. Coca-Cola returned to mainland China in 1979, becoming a symbol of economic reform and American influence. Videogames became more widely available during the 1980s, opening up new worlds of popular media, play and visual imagination that inspired the artist as a teenager.
The Long March
The Long March was a military retreat by the Chinese Red Army between 1934 and 1936. Communist soldiers travelled thousands of kilometres through mountains, rivers and grasslands while pursued by Nationalist forces. During this journey, Mao Zedong’s leadership grew in importance.
After the Chinese Communist Party formed the government in 1949, the Long March became a revolutionary legend. The endurance, sacrifice and collective purpose within the story have been praised and helped shape Mao’s leadership and the identity of modern China.
Handscrolls and side-scrollers
The side-scrolling format of Long March: Restart echoes traditional Chinese handscroll painting. Handscrolls evolved from early Chinese texts written on bamboo and silk, and became an important form of painting by the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). By the Song dynasty (960–1279), artists used handscrolls to create sweeping landscapes that invited viewers to travel through time, space and story.
Side-scrolling also became an important development in videogame history, allowing players to move through worlds beyond the edges of the screen. Feng Mengbo brings these traditions together, creating a digital scroll through history.